Brevity
by f3tid
Summary: My only fault was that I was ambitious and wholly unrepentant for it.
1. Flesh Wounds

**A/N:** I took a short break from my other work to toy around with my two favorite characters in my new favorite game. I'm not sure whether or not to continue or leave it for what it is. I don't know if I made this clear or not, but this is set in the five months between Haytham's stealing Braddock's plans and the actual attack. Let me know what you think with a comment! Thanks so much for reading.

**Disclaimer:** All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.

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Whatever phantom compulsion it was that guided my steps that horrid torrential morning would not be denied nor delayed. I lacked reason or excuse for my endeavors, of that I was only vaguely aware, as I traversed the precarious white plateau of the countryside on horseback. The poor beast brayed desperately for relief of my incessant command as I coerced him forthwith into the tumultuously abstract face of the nearest pike, but still I jerked my heels and slowly we contended the geographical leviathan. I had long since been deprived of sensation throughout the entirety of my body, and was tragically growing accustomed to the numbness of my skin, of the disconcerting dullness of my complexion when subjected to the cold of the American frontier. I tried to ignore the pleading whisper redolent in some cavernous nook of my mind that advised I turn back for Boston. I had already gone too far.

I couldn't easily identify the innate desire that drew me and my steed up the cliffside that dawn, only that I was conscious of its presence, no matter how inconvenient or confounding. I'd have denied it, but I knew for certain it was that woman. She hadn't summoned me and certainly would not, under any concurrent circumstances, and that fact alone motivated my drastic attempt at initiative. There wasn't an iota of personal gratification to be garnered from rising before the sun and scaling the side of a blizzard wrought mountain, and my awareness of my own absurdity only frustrated and impassioned me ever more.

I cinched my jaw and grimaced as my teeth gnashed crudely against one another, coiling my unfeeling fingers around the chafing reins constraining the pinto's pleading jowls. I empathized silently with the stallion, and chided myself for the force I exerted with a stiff tug of my arms. Nevertheless, we absconded what had to have been miles of unforgivingly frozen and jagged rock and dunes of multiple feet of snow, being pelted violently with sleet and plagued by frigid gales thrashing carnally about, directionless. I was more gracious, I think, than ever I had been before when we approached the peak and the terrain began to level.

The vengeful caterwaul of the icy maelstrom receded slightly as I spurred my horse through the white ravaged timberland, my eyes keenly scouring the immediate topography for any signs of settlement. My efforts were rewarded only with disparagingly dense fog and an abundance of precipitation, as I had anticipated. Every inch of my incrementally suffering flesh supplicated that I abandon the ill-conceived expedition and take shelter a few miles in precedence, but my incorrigible stubbornness disallowed the thought to sully my mind for even an instant. Onward, we stalked.

Time collapsed and transmuted itself meaninglessly behind my eyelids with every blink or extensive period of dormancy. My skin was parched, injured and bleeding in a number of particularly exposed regions, my face for certain. I was no longer reminded of the ardor I was imposing upon my mount with every footfall of his mighty hoof, as the anxious and miserable cries perished with the upturn of the wind. I remained vigilant, despite the improbability of fair fortune, and cursed my heart for its unmistakable missteps whenever the thought of the woman resurfaced from the depths of my restless mind. Somewhere between the rural outskirts of Boston and this damned mountaintop, I had fabricated that my intentions were purely strategic in nature – regarding the skeletal plan of attack we'd all dreamed up only days before. I was a rather shoddy liar, but even in my haste, I had myself convinced.

How many seconds, minutes, hours, or combination of the lot elapsed before I was finally roused from my autonomous stupor, I hadn't an inkling. All I knew, in that infinitesimal moment of clarity and consciousness, was that the voice that called accusingly out into the frothy ether of the tempest belonged to her. I wasn't any less of an impetuous and inconstant man for what I'd done, but the contentment that soon set alight my entrails and incited a fractured grin to my certainly wounded visage curiously made it all inane. I loosened my vice grip on the reins and peered imploringly into the snow as the unintelligible contralto cries grew louder, more comprehensible.

"Come no closer," I managed to decipher from the obtrusive ambiance of the storm, then suddenly, "_Kenway_?"

She was near. I found it frightfully instinctive to subdue myself, and thusly pressed my lips into a firm and tepid line, though the drum of my heart fell out of measure as she approached me. She was enshrouded in the burnished hide of a mammoth beast slain – a grizzly, I gathered – and held a gentle hand over her eyes like a visor against the snowfall. Each step she took required that she protract either of her gangly bronze legs out of the ground and plunge back in, consumed to the hip in unimaginable cold. Still, she advanced.

She poised a hand upon my horse's muzzle and gazed up at me with distant tawny eyes. "I thought you would be gone from here."

"It was my intent to review the map." I lied, and made victims of us both.

Her typically rather harsh brow pinched slightly in rejoinder, ascribable either to linguistic misunderstanding or the ridiculousness of my request and the perils withstood to fulfill it. She always seemed to have a pensive quality, though, regardless of expression or sentiment. The young woman slipped her hand from the steed's convulsing nostrils and along the bridle, tugging it free of my fingers and taking them into her own. She set a manageable pace for the direction in which she had emerged from the haze, but I interrupted her before she had fully submerged her foot into the snow. I pressed my gloved fingertips against the croup of the fatigued creature and exerted a great deal of my handicapped strength into dismounting it, taking gauchely to my feet in the inhospitable thickness of the snow.

"Zi-Ziio, you needn't escort the both of us that way. Here, I can walk." I uneasily assured her as we fell into step. My gait, being significantly loftier, proffered advantage over her diminutive stature, but I tailored my steps to better accommodate her.

"The camp is not far." She replied, glancing first to me and then to the stallion ambling in her wake. After a few moments of pervasive whispers of the wind, she returned her passive eyes to my frame once more, apprehension knotting her brows. "Your horse is exhausted."

I chuckled haplessly, glancing down at my hands as they coddled one another in vain. "As am I. I pushed him too far this morning, I'm afraid."

I felt her exploratory gaze scour my person, and coughed against the residual restriction of my throat. Abandoning the short-lived effort of coaxing the sensation back into my fingers, I relocated my hands, one instinctively to the hilt of my sword peering from the brim of its sheath and the other along the nape of my neck. I glanced abruptly to my flank, purposelessly surveying the otherwise undisturbed white coated coppices for fear that my eye would wander to meet that of the woman beside me. I had executed all that she had asked of me over the tumultuous course of our association and gained her allegiance, but little else. She never claimed to trust me and, though I knew better, I expected it.

"It was unwise to make that journey alone," she said some time later, and I could hear the smile manipulating her ample lips purely by the jaunty inflection of her voice. "Especially without something to protect your face from the wind."

"Am I amusing you?"

I absentmindedly relegated my fingers to my cheek, still naught for sensation, and promptly recoiled from it with a hiss. The flesh there seared under the ginger touch of my buckskin glove long after I'd cordially retracted my hand and I festered quietly for a few moments, listening vacantly to the reverberation of Ziio's laughter. After the endearingly girlish carousal diminished, the breeze drove my gaze to her, and my mouth roused into a weak smile. She did not look at me for a short while as she allowed her eyes to lie dormant, the specter of her snickering hinging a simper of her own upon her lips. I was quite abruptly set at ease.

She stirred to awareness with a lingering languor, and immediately she met my eyes. The humor had fled, but the vitality remained. "I can attend to you once we reach the camp, do not fret."

I found it increasingly difficult to divert my attention. "I would greatly appreciate it, thank you."

We did not exchange many words for the remainder of our trek through the brush, and those that we did were sparse and conversational. Though I hadn't a proclivity for pleasantries, something about her – this astute and remarkably adept native – only further enveloped me in her irrevocable gravity. My stare had taken shelter in her countenance, my smile contingent upon the infrequent glint of the sun against her flesh and my heart palpitating with every glimpse of her austere eyes in my nebulous direction. Even as I sidled by inches with the sole intent of being beside her, I was assured of my innocence. I was there for the map, and nothing more.

The musky scent of burning mosses and sequoia fibers pervaded the frigid air cavorted about us in the clearing we had approached, and Ziio confirmed my unspoken presumption with a nod. She flicked her tongue deftly against her teeth and produced a sound that incepted sport in the horse tethered to her steady hand. They trotted on in tandem through the throng of tree trunks and frosty thickets of greenery and I tailed closely behind. The rhythmic and spirituous murmur of buckskin doldrums flooded the small ring of tents and makeshift shanties occupying the space before us, unscathed by the blizzard due to the dense canopy overhead and clamorous otherwise with sounds of construction, talk, and the remote din of community.

To my astonishment and chagrin, the camp carried on with the nonchalance of civilization and functionality. It did not misrepresent the base chores of routine in Boston, with men toiling away with tools – no matter how crude, women dressing game for preparation and crafting items of pragmatism. There was rationale, a structure unrehearsed, and society amongst those people. I had never heard or witnessed anything of its kind, especially regarding the natives. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was intruding upon a private paradigm, very much disparate from myself and others like me.

"Are you coming?" resounded Ziio's rhetoric from a few paces away.

I felt the flesh crease on my forehead as I cast my attention to her, brows reeled upward in surprise. She continued along the outskirts of the encampment, towing my horse along behind us as I reached her within a matter of steps. She glanced almost expectantly up at me as my presence disrupted her seclusion, perhaps sensing my awe.

"This is your village, then?" I posed my query guardedly.

She shook her head with a modest chortle, unlike the bout of laughter she had succumbed to en route. A smirk teased my lips ever still. "No, no. Kanien'keha:ka is very far from here. This place is only temporary until we begin the assault on Braddock's battalion. Most of us are slave refugees. Others have been scorned by him and seek only retribution for what they have lost."

"Surely your people will join you when we _do _make our move."

"I will not ask anything of them that I can do myself." And she was cold again.

The woman had since released my steed and allowed him to canter idly only after she caressed the grove of his chin and grazed her forehead tenderly against his muzzle. She dallied not in watching the mighty creature traipse about, and instead pinched the fabric of my ulster betwixt her thumb and forefinger, guiding me by the arm into the aperture of a nearby thatched roof lean-to. I bowed my spine and shrunk into my shoulders to avoid a collision with the wooden beam impressed into the hut's frame. She released me while I assessed the state of her dwelling with a probative eye, one hand relieving me of my tricorn hat out of autonomous courtesy.

Ziio took to her haunches in the center of the room, cupping her hands about her lips and channeling air betwixt them with the objective of eliciting a sizeable flame from the rudimentary hearth before her. I wrinkled my nose as the arid fumes of smoke captivated the hut, but was thankful for the warm glow of the pyre that exuded soon thereafter. She gradually rose to her feet and shed the downy cape drawn across the slight slope of her shoulders and allowed it to pool on the earth beneath her.

"Thank you," I rasped solemnly as I drew nearer to the fire and withdrew my hands from their deerskin cloaks.

She disappeared into an indiscriminant corner of the hovel and I heard her maneuvering at a dogged pace with utensils and what I imagined to be a tribal tonic or something equally as dubious. The maddening clamor of her ministrations came paused, however, a few moments later and I liberated a sigh from the depths of my chest. I had reclaimed my hands from the frost and muscled my way through the sensational lethargy that took them afterward.

"Did you still want to go over the map?" she asked.

I weighed the ramifications of the honorable response, the one that would most appease the Order and legitimize my navigation of the mountainside. I swallowed dryly upon the fallacy as well as the obligation it entailed; pondered carefully how I would most desire the remainder of the afternoon to transpire, and what I would have to compromise for, ever in the favor of my ideology. I pursed my lips and exhaled gruffly through my nostrils before pivoting on my heel.

"No." my voice was strained and I lectured myself intrinsically for my folly. My only fault was that I was ambitious and wholly unrepentant for it.

I steeled myself in anticipation of further inquiry, but was pleasantly met only with the crackling simmer of the small licks of flame contained by a roundel of obsidian and gravel. I reclined on the soil, perching one foot before the fire and allowing the other to fall slack beside it and supporting my mass with the palm of one hand. I hooked my chin over the knee of the extended leg and watched the fluid blaze dance over and about itself, relishing in the heat radiating from its golden core. Ziio paced quietly across the squalid ground and eventually ensconced herself beside me, legs folded over one another and petite frame swiveled to face me directly.

My brow wadded defensively. "You've a reason for staring at me, I assume."

The woman groused incomprehensibly under the veneer of a sigh, skulking toward me on her knees and taking my jaw in her hand. In the other, I noted, she bore a primitive basin and a rent stretch of cloth. She flexed her fingertips against the grain of my jowls and directed my face to her, adjusting her vantage point to better surmise the severity of the raw wounds marring my cheeks. Given a few moments of study, she soaked the cloth in an amalgam of liquid and foliage and applied it to the plane of broken skin. My flesh burned with the immediacy and alarm of manifold pinpricks, but I did not acknowledge it.

She no longer graced my superficial injuries with her honeyed eyes, but deliberately sought my own. Her expression distracted from the detriment and irritability it had once beheld and became inscrutable. I tried in futility to derive rationality and ventured forth a number of centimeters, as though clarity might offer insight. Her busied hand stroked the opposite hemisphere of my face with the medicated fabric poised between us. Between my rampant thoughts and the depleting proximity between the woman and I, I realized my heart had carried off without me. The ceaseless thrum of the loathsome muscle against my chest wracked my entire body, drumming away at my ears and smothering even the subtlest of sounds from attracting my attention.

"Ziio," I said, deafened.

With the thinnest of movements, she rid us of the decidedly small chasm between our frames. She embraced my neck with the latter of her hands, thumbing gently against my mandible as her lips collided spectacularly with mine.


	2. Breakfast in America

**A/N:** I've decided to give Brevity a chance. I want to personally thank everyone who followed, favorited, and reviewed. You guys are really too kind. Please enjoy, and give me feedback. Until next time.

**Disclaimer:** The following characters belong to Ubisoft entertainment. I do not own, nor claim ownership of any of the following.

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The invasive stench of burning bread wafted through the pine addled air. The sun's obstinate light warmed my flesh and permeated my eyes, although they laid sealed in slumber. As I drew nearer and nearer to wakefulness, I heard the menial buzz of domesticity – the polyphonic chaos of conversation, instruction, the clattering of dishes, and the listless underscore of the house band playing a lazy tune of their own invention. I wrinkled my brow in displeasure, but refrained from willing my eyes alive as I clung hopelessly to the fading inertia of sleep. A hoarse groan seeped disdainfully from my chest as I inhaled the scent of linen from the pillow confined betwixt my arms.

I immersed myself into the fray shortly thereafter, having clad and groomed myself accordingly in the inn's substandard second-floor lavatory. I narrowly evaded being swindled into parlay with the innkeeper's coquettish wife and navigated the Green Dragon's unusually crowded foyer with practiced cunning, shoving aside ilk of ill purpose and significance. Scoffing at the extraordinarily poor conduct of a fellow nearest the bar, my attention was entreated by the affably robust voice of a man I recognized to be Charles Lee. I expelled a grateful sigh as I traversed the last of the current of famished men and women alike and took a seat amongst my colleagues.

"Haytham, old boy, it's good to see you. Did you sleep well?" Charles mused with a rap of my shoulder.

"Did you sleep at all?" Hickey slurred beneath the guise of a maleficent smirk. I cinched a cautionary brow at the young scoundrel across the table, but he persisted with a guffaw. "I 'member well enough that you took off for the day while the lot of us was only sleepin', and nobody saw you come back 'til the tavern was closin' for the night. Who's the broad?"

My fingers retracted instinctively into fists atop the surface of the table, nails scraping against the varnish and my teeth grinding undetectably behind a thoroughly manufactured expression. I watched him for a moment, leering oafishly from the shadow cast by the protruding lip of his cap, and pondered whether it'd be worth the trouble to strike him across the face. I glanced curtly, with a nonchalant sniff, to my ulster sleeve and elected against it. I had very little interest in soiling my clothes with impudent blood so early in the day.

"There isn't one," I spoke eventually, steering my gaze warily across the piecemeal bounty placed before me by a woman in employ at the tavern. "I traveled to the native camp just north of Lexington yesterday. I had planned to spend the daylight hours there, hence my leaving so early and returning so late. That's not to mention the god awful snowstormI had to fight through."

"Perfectly fair, I'd say. Traversing those woods even in _comely_ weather is somethin' of a gamble." A nearly jollily complacent William Johnson added from the cavernous innards of his mug, the remnants of a grin lousing about his face. Pitcairn, at the head of the table and already enthralled and knuckle deep in his gruel, nodded with a gamey snort of what I had interpreted to be corroboration.

The rather spacious lobby was burdened with reputation and therefore infested with people at all hours of the day, save for the obligatory afternoon drought. Unending was the sound of the compendium, cohabitating as they were. The whole building now reeked of evidence of a negligent cook, and a roomful of people spoiled themselves with the same scalded bread and salted cod that stared daringly up at me from a fissured porcelain plate. I pressed my lips against one another in contempt of the slipshod meal and opted instead for tea.

The Green Dragon was far from the ideal quartering facility, but it suited me well enough, so long as I slept heavy and enjoyed my sunrises accompanied by the cacophonous shrieks of the drunken swills perpetually haunting the main floor. I wasn't much for drink, nor tobacco – taboos of the hands and lips. My aptitude in taking life and preserving my anonymity relied exclusively upon the alertness of my mind, and the lackadaisical disorient of inebriation mired and repulsed me. The same, as I had observed, could not have been said of my allies, but I did not judge them harshly for their erring.

Hickey's voice overshadowed the horrid buzz of the public and I referred my attention thus. "You say 'Perfectly fair,' like there ain't a woman. Just because he popped in on the reds doesn't mean he didn't have his way. You find a squaw you fancy?"

I bit back a scurrilous string of words with a disdainful chuckle. "When I said 'There isn't a woman', Hickey, I _meant_ there isn't a woman."

"Ziio's a player in our lobby against Braddock. Don't be vulgar, Thomas." Charles' contribution to the unfortunate exchange was volleyed between sputters of incredulous laughter.

"Oh, she has a name!" Hickey exclaimed after a swig of the ale primed in his left hand. "'Tio', the buxom barbarian a' the forest. Haytham, I almost didn't take you for the kind."

"_'Ziio'_." I corrected through the miniscule bridge between my teeth.

The man's overbearing brow furrowed in humored bafflement, his filthy face falling, but the vile smirk lingering on his alcohol soured lips. "What's it matter what 'er name is? Do you _want_ to bed the thing?"

I did not distract from my imposing glare, but I felt Charles glance in uncertainty between me and the others. I steepled my fingers mildly upon the table, silently and undiscernibly imagining how simplistic a conquest it would be to reach across the table and behead the nuisance in the midst of his ill-conceived rabble rousing. Johnson had cried out in protest the moment we were to be blanketed by silence whilst Hickey cackled on. Charles pitched in meagerly, as moderate men are liable to do, if given some incentive. Fearful of confrontation, Pitcairn rasped a query regarding the whereabouts of our local contact, Benjamin Church, and received no response. Being him a fairly intelligent man, I'm certain he had foreseen it.

"What in God's name did I do? It's a fuckin' _savage_ we're talking about!" Hickey shouted, condescension etched across his lopsided simper.

"_She_!" Johnson roared in retort, his baritone thrusting our region of the pub into a state of unease. Perhaps he was too engrossed in his argument – a compassionate man with a great deal of sympathy for those deserving, and still many unfit for the charity that was his boundless empathy – to notice the feeble and gradual retreat of the bar occupants about us, else I am confident he'd have kept his peace and encouraged his civil opponent to do the same. "_She_ is a person, just like all the rest! Yer welcome to your opinions, no matter how shite they are for true, but I won't have you treatin' people like _things_ in my company."

"What're you goin' on about? Y'don't even know the broad!"

Charles stood from his seat and lobbed himself onto the other end of the table. He shunted between the two men with one arm bent at the elbow, the other extended to repel one of them by the chest. "Thomas, William, _please_! Lower your voices, take your seats and kindly let these fine people enjoy their food, eh?"

A few objections were hoisted about in the whirlwind writhing between Hickey and Johnson, but it dispersed within a few moments and we all abided by Charles' scandalous proposition of neutrality for the remainder of the morning. The lad attempted conversation once or twice, but only Pitcairn was ubiquitous enough in sangfroid to carry it to fruition. I shook my head and excused myself from the proceedings after pouring tea for Johnson, his hands having been unsteadied by the untarnished wrath pulsating through his veins and reinvigorated by every half-note thump of his heart. I nodded to my colleagues with a rigid frown before absconding to the stairwell with no intention of coming back.

Contrary to Hickey's brazen and largely satirical allegations, I did not rob Ziio of her virtue the day before. I recalled vividly the touch of her skin against mine and the resplendent ambiance of the humbly flickering fire, the tranquil cadence of the tribal drums and the deviations of the low, gentle mewls fleeing her lips. Every movement she made was thoughtful, bleeding with sincerity, but not hesitant. Her fingertips roamed across my jaw and neck and she had caught my gaze with the widest and most inquisitive brown eyes as she parted from me, head downcast and scrutiny tilted to the heavens. I could do nothing but stare at her in those few fragile moments before we struck one another again.

Our lips melded and her hands caressed either sides of my face. I splayed my fingers across her waist and marveled inwardly at the size of my hands in comparison to her frame. I tugged her close and rejoiced in the flavor of her lips, the approach and regression of her heaving chest against mine, the sensation of her feverish flesh beneath my unclad hands. The sun had dipped just below the tree line and the sky was engulfed by pallid streaks of orange and scarlet when she advised I take leave. I agreed, and made no effort to uproot myself from the ground, nor her from atop me. She delved in close but did not kiss me again, touching her forehead to my brow and her nose to mine. Her eyes fell closed but still I observed, enamored beyond reason. She curled her fingers idly against my chin in farewell and I forced myself to leave her.

The gentle, intimate memories incited the growth of an interminable smile across my face. I ran the battle trodden underside of my palm across my forehead in the shadow of a vacantly congenial sigh and placed the quill on its side on the desktop. I dug my heels into the floor and left the wooden chair beside the davenport, padding slowly toward the bed. My fingers closed carefully around the reflective brass radius of the first of the buttons binding my coat to my form and succeeded in relieving me of a few before my fixations meandered to the window adjacent me.

My adept vision was hampered only by the ebony geometric silhouettes of the rooftops miring the skyline, but beyond the buildings, canopies, and scaffolds, I sought solace in the muted wane of the tide. Smearing the tempered waves were the tall and imposing molds of ships, sea faring vassals of the genteel, bobbing to and from Great Britain on the malleable back of the ocean. Gradually, my fingers halted in their efforts and drew along my front until falling slack at my sides. I took a step toward the window and watched as a massive cargo vessel disengaged the Boston harbor and lazily began to turn about on its axis, the hull piercing the thin veil of fog engulfing the very surface of the water. Preceding the ship were a modest fleet of schooners and sloops, spearheaded by a single, outwardly identical cargo ship to that of the last one to emigrate from port. Minutes passed and eventually all of the crafts began to shrink into the sliver of incandescence lapping at the horizon like the swell upon the briny shore. I watched the convoy surrender to the oblivion of the Atlantic and, as my thoughts withdrew back to Ziio and the velveteen consistency of her voice against my ear and her flesh upon my flesh, I had no desire to be among them.


	3. I Am Not a Stranger

**A/N:** The response to this story is vastly more than anything I could've imagined. I thank you so truly from the bottom of my heart, to every follower and reviewer of this story. I'm very passionate about this chapter, and I certainly hope that came across in my writing. I hope you'll enjoy it.

**Disclaimer:** All of the characters in the proceeding piece are copyrighted in entirety to Ubisoft. I do not own, nor claim ownership of anything.

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I combed the coast with a strict glower, tapered brow clinching snug in opposition of the probing streams of sunlight pealing through the gaps in the abundant foliage overhead. A reflex and indifferent scowl marred my hardened countenance in shallow defense against the mystique of the innermost throes of the frost dusted woodland. In the same instance, I was intimidated and frightfully fascinated by the utterly alien realm I had voluntarily disturbed. My head swiveled promptly at the pitchy caw of a distant fowl and again at the unsettling chorus of rustling underbrush and the petrified corpses of felled leaves, twigs, and parched soil and snow upheaved in the same vein of wind.

My nostrils flared as the gale tore along the embankment and ravaged my exposed skin, sweeping the sable locks strewn across my shoulder into the air and against my cheek. I cracked the reins woven intricately between my digits and my steed jerked violently into gallop along the beach, its feral shriek distressing the orchestrated bedlam of the forest. I cursed the lake's tranquility beneath my breath as I approached it – a gargantuan mountain sewn with snowcapped evergreens and accompanied by a slew of indiscriminant white foothills, branching from the peak and avalanching into a stagnant freshwater pool.

A buck planted along the water's edge glanced up at me before frantically bulleting back into the trees. Its husky grunt and the clamor of its hooves through the thinning snow against the grit of the forest floor instigated another earthy symphonic. In moments, the weald erupted with the reverberations of evasive fauna, clambering, clawing, sprinting, flying and fleeing the waterfront. The communal cries of the native creatures thundered the grove and exploded into the air, discord and enchantment echoing throughout my immediate surroundings until vanishing into silence and finality. I had decelerated the anxious horse to a languorous trot as we traversed the sand, enthralled and challenged by the disastrous calm.

I wandered into the winding entrails of the forest with the hedonistic purpose of seeing Ziio again. I had agonized quietly over the prospect for days, reliving the embrace we'd shared countless times and dissecting every second for meaning. I had embarked upon a number of excursions with Lee and the others in an attempt to appease the self-imposed debt that had metastasized upon my conscience, and whilst my hands forged alliances and claimed lives, my thoughts were zealous entirely to the enigmatic glimmer in the savage beauty's eyes and the mild twinge of her lips, cast eternally in neither a smile nor a frown. As much as the idea intimidated and perplexed me, I pined for the tine of her decadent voice and the argumentative jilt of her brow. I left the Green Dragon the moment the memory of her kiss began to pale.

I had shifted my gaze to the water, watching the shuddering refraction of the sun creep along its corrugated surface as I evaluated my own thoughts. I was enabling a demoniac fantasy in my ceaseless pursuit of the young Mohawk woman. For every traitorous instant the depths of my mind were ailed with her name, her visage, the garbled memories of her breath against my lips, the motives of the Order were deprived of me. I closed my fingers around the amulet strung about my neck and tautened my jaw. I was wasting time and energy, and I was frightened by how little I cared.

The carnal jostling of tree limbs and desiccated vegetation distracted my listless line of sight and I instinctively reached for my pistol. Upon turning to determine the cause of the disarray, index finger fixed upon the trigger, the pine nearest the curvature of the valley into the lakebed rustled vehemently before me. My brows pinched cautiously and I wrought my lips against one another. From the writhing and hoary nettles emerged a small, hunched creature, coated in coarse russet fur. I craned my neck in an attempt to identify the beast and it hurled itself against the mounds of intermingled soil, snow, and grass, propelling violently toward me with a strange and vengeful snarl. I exhaled soberly and pulled the trigger.

My active hand was jammed suddenly into the air, the bullet harmlessly rupturing the air with a thunderous roar. I glanced urgently to my manipulated arm with the underdeveloped beginnings of protest welling in my throat and before I could cast my eye upon the monster in my midst, I was overpowered by the untarnished momentum that it had accrued in its haste. I heard my horse wail in fright and trample off in a wild trajectory as I tumbled from the saddle, yelping. Water expanded all around me, seeped into the fabric adorning my figure and took amorphous shape briefly in the air before surrendering itself to the pool once more. My eyes were and my veins pulsated blaringly beneath my skin and I beheld the creature with a startled grunt. Before I could make sense of the situation, I produced a blade from beneath my coat sleeve with a capricious gesticulation of my wrist and clamped one hand around the creature's throat, warding it from my face with the debilitating force of my fingers. The serrated edge of a roguish weapon bit triflingly into my neck.

"_Ziio_?" I probed breathlessly between my warring teeth.

The woman presided over me with an authoritative, conclusive stance – one knee imbedded in my abdomen and the fingers on her subdominant hand knotted in my collar while those on other pressed a knife to my jugular. I was livid and intrigued by her tact. She bore the same bearskin pelt she had had when she discovered my horse and I in the brunt of a calamitous blizzard weeks in precedence. As she grimaced down at me, a dramatic arch in her brow and the teeming of sacrilege in her native dialect on her tongue, I don't think I'd ever found her so beautiful. She wrenched me forth and I tightened the grip I established on her larynx.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" she wheezed domineeringly against my fingers.

"I daresay I should ask the same of you." She jerked the blade deeper into my skin, likely displeased by the composure of my tone.

"You chased them away." She choked.

"The animals?" I shirked from her momentarily, puzzlement contorting my face unsavorily. "That was _hardly_ myfault."

The evanescent sheen of her eyes in the sunlight all but disappeared as they diminished into lucid slats, rueful and severe. Blood dribbled from the expanding perforation of my flesh, but I cleared my throat resolutely against her imminent and eager spear. I drew my hand to her cheek and halted just before brushing my fingers against the copper skin that lay there, pressing the fine tip of a hidden blade against her neck. A growl churned low in her chest.

"Let me up," my voice was hushed and sternly politic. "And we will talk."

Given a moment of deliberation, the young woman disposed of her weapon and I dislodged my fingertips from her esophagus. She retreated to her toes, turned gruffly from me, and pulled the thick hide further over her bare shoulders while tending to her throat with her hands. She rivaled the coast with increasing footsteps as I rose from the shallows and surveyed the state of my attire. I was sodden with residual run-off from the towering cliff side, filthy with the grime and grain of the lakebed's bottom and I mourned my cloak with a fleeting groan. I disregarded the wounded plea of my skin, rent asunder, and instead strode after the object of my intent.

"Where in blazes are you going?" I rather stated, than inquired. "I _said_ we were going to talk."

She did not look at me as I impeded her step, shoulders squared and spine erected, only pressed a palm to my upper torso. I was conscious of the rapidity of my heartbeat, and slightly alarmed that she'd detect it as well. I observed anticipatorily as her chest expanded and deflated promptly, as though she'd devoured the words that inhabited her maw. Her fingertips flexed almost undetectably against the ornate material embellishing my body and she remained quiet for a few more moments.

"How did you find me?" she suddenly said, ostensibly angry, and yet her hand remained.

"I asked about you at the camp, and one of your men pointed me here."

"They failed to mention I was hunting?"

I sighed. "They did not."

Ziio tilted her head up at me, a reproachful scowl distorting her flawless physiognomy. Foundationless words roiled at the back of my throat, contingent upon abating her fury, but never matured beyond guttural utterances. She wielded all the force that her petite frame could muster through her hands and shoved past me and into the brush. I lingered on my heels for a moment, arms sprawled and fingers fringed, before eventually giving chase.

Her body maneuvered fluidly through the outlaying limbs of threadbare greenery speckling the forest floor, contorting and constricting at once and sometimes not at all. She coexisted fecklessly with her world; swept her feet in tempo with the frostbitten wail of the wind and conformed her gait to the intricate design of the briar. The lengthy stretch of fur reamed across her shoulders hove heftily about her naked legs, stringing along in the snow and accenting her tracks. I was wiser than to replicate the deft and airy lilt of her steps and instead carved my way through nature's caravansary, blade brandished at my wrist.

"If you'd only let me speak to you-" I relayed tersely as I swiped the dehydrated extremity off of an obtrusive shrub.

"You have spoken enough."

I glared, although I was not graced with her veneer. "If I may, I'd like to ask something of you."

"Then you may not." she spouted cursorily over her shoulder.

The woman ceased her brief journey at the base of a towering pitch pine. The tree was gnarled and saturated nearest the snow plagued ground, bits of softened flesh dangling weakly from the trunk and cluttering the ivory mounds of slush that covered the perimeter. She stared firmly up into the malformed, barren limbs compacted between those of neighboring copses and foliage, and therefore transmuted into something of a grotesque cluster of bark, mangled talons and the thick layers of ice that enshrouded them all. I watched her for a moment as she studied the unsightly thing, face vacant of the perturbation that had so afflicted her. She was enthralled only by her impenetrable focus as I flanked her composedly and drove my stout sabre into the tree's shaft. I hesitated before touching her, but resolved to take her by the arm and guide her forcefully against the tree's face.

She writhed in hostility against my hand, but reeled her eyes to mine instead of instigating another row. Her teeth grated loathsomely behind a panicked yelp and I leaned in, touching my brow to hers.

I demanded as softly as my jilted temperament would allow. "Talk to me."

The warmth of her skin radiated unto mine and as we shared that thoughtful, irate gaze, her breath devolved into long-drawn and anxious respites. The dissatisfaction in her frown was palpable. "The men and women of the camp have been working tirelessly - day and night. It is winter and everything is dead, the hunt scarce. They require food and I must retrieve it. _Let _me."

"I'm afraid I can't." I witnessed the anger flood her features and was ensnared by her stare.

"You _can_."

"You're absolutely correct," I proffered with the understated degree of decorum, "I am completely capable of releasing you, but you see, I've made that mistake before. You took off like a rabid animal into the trees and I very nearly lost you. This time you've ambushed and subsequently _injured_ me, frightened my horse off into the wild, and adamantly _refuse_ to humor me with a simple conversation. This really isn't a matter of whether or not I _can_ let you go free, but rather if I _will_. And at present, your odds are unfavorable."

She rolled her eyes dismissively. "The horse will return if he is trained well, and your cut will heal."

"And what of the talk?"

"Are we not talking _now_?"

I unhinged my jaw, glancing temporarily away from the infuriating woman before returning my gaze and reinforcing my scowl. "You know very well what I mean."

She said nothing. I was conjured nearer.

"The last we met," I murmured scornfully against her ear after angling my face appropriately, "You took me in your arms and kissed me, unprovoked. Why?"

"I was curious." She responded brusquely.

I felt her move against my skin, the bridge of her nose nudging against my cheek. I gulped strenuously on the stifling notch in my throat. I was tempted to match her efforts with my own, but my nerve endings spiked and my appendages stiffened, my muscles taut and confined by my frigid flesh. Her errant lips stirred against my jowl and expelled a slew of words I did not comprehend, although the cadence set me ill at ease. I ushered myself back into awareness when I recognized my name, laden and sugared by her voice.

"Haytham," she whispered frenetically. I wrinkled my brow at the frantic nature of her tone and the stalwart tug of her little fingers against my waistcoat. "Haytham, turn around and brace yourself."

I parted my lips to contest her deliberate instruction, but the resonation of a bovine snort squelched the sentiment before it was born. I swiveled my gaze conscientiously beyond the woman before me and over the breadth of my shoulder when the cold air I inhaled hitched in my throat. My eyes broadened in much the same time as my deportment as I broke the haughty gaze between Ziio and the wooly titan behind me. It paved a portent rift in the snow with the gnarled ridge of its massive hoof, a gust of vapor spewing free of its engorged nostrils and masking its fearsome long face. Two convoluted calcium tusks sprouted from either margin of its skull, jutted laterally, and speared the air with mettlesome and misshapen prongs. The thing was immense with its hefty head pointed squarely at my back and a wrathful grunt burdened on its snout.

"What in god's name is that?" I mumbled in awe.

"_Atena:ti_," she answered and adopted a discreetness of voice.

Without delay, I dislodged my blade with one short and powerful jerk of my arm and rotated on one foot to combat the creature. My arms were spread territorially, in much the same fashion as the atena:ti's hind legs and antlers. As I skirted the slight clearing, its eyes and body followed, shoulder blades further flexing, hiking. I risked a foolishly intrepid glimpse at the tree trunk, only to watch as Ziio clambered along its length and into the haven offered by its bizarre branches. I growled spitefully against a frown as I willed my fixations back unto the bovid goliath rearing for attack. Within seconds, the beast released an extraordinarily canine shriek before it rushed me, startlingly swift and forceful beyond my range of understanding. Its savage cry rumbled the icy earth compressed beneath its rolling hooves and the stagnant soles of my boots.

Impulsively, I kicked my own feet from beneath me and allowed myself to collapse unto the ground. Freezing as it was, I permitted the impetus of the abrupt movement to push my body forth amongst the small knolls of ice until it inevitably halted. My lungs inflated rapidly in response to the adrenaline fueling the race of my heart and the dilation of my pupils. I plunged my dagger heartily into the belly of the beast as it lay indefensible to my siege, raking my wrist along with minor injunctions, given the meaty composition just beneath its hardy flesh. Its agonized and angry rejoinder flooded the air and I reprehended the residual spatter of blood upon my face and already stained outer clothes. In the beast's lamentation, I scrambled back to the base of the tree, hyperactive pulse quaking my frame and silencing reality. I yielded my weapon just beneath the fret of my fingers and watched readily as the creature trampled wrathfully about before facing me again.

It rallied unto its haunches and swung its mighty fore legs in the air before slamming them into the dirt and the filth and the snow. Meaningless moments elapsed before it was sneering and careening ferociously toward me once more and I planted my feet, blade flaunted proudly and a daring leer upon my face. The imposing barbs of its horns invaded my vision and defied the hungry tug of my tendons against the bone until quite suddenly, they did not. From a leafless egress in the canopy above, burst the body of a significantly smaller mongrel, swathed in a cape of furs and emanating a feminine call that ricocheted from tree to tree. The creature landed atop the atena:ti and wrung its slender arms about its neck, steering it free of my position. It lurched abruptly toward the unsettled earth and carried its concluded prey down with it. The larger of the beasts belted out a colossal screech of pain before its adversary unsheathed a manmade dirk and promptly buried it into the broader side of its neck, eliciting a geyser of blood from a sizeable and severed sinew. Crimson rained from the fresh wound onto the cloak of its foe and the atena:ti's howls diminished along with the shimmer of life in its big black eyes. From the mound of fur, flesh, and bloodied snow rose the distinctive and enticing frame of a woman that soon turned to face me.

"Z-Ziio," I managed against the ragged pang of my heart to my chest.

"Thank you." She said with a smile.


	4. A Lamentable Procession

**A/C:** I apologize for the delay! Finals are intensive, unfortunately, but this chapter is the longest by far, so I hope that makes up for it. I want to thank everyone for the kind and wonderful reviews as always, and I entreat you to gift me with your feedback. Thanks again, and enjoy.

**Disclaimer:** All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.

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I had seen Charles Lee off that morning sans the company of our fellow men. He claimed to have postponed his services to General Braddock for much too long, and was noticeably diffident to distance himself from the endeavors of me, Johnson, Church, Hickey, and Pitcairn. He was naïve and resolutely ignorant at the ever-present behest of the Order, but his dedication was admirable, regardless. I had no esoteric or profound words to give in lieu of his impending departure, and thusly said nothing. He nodded to me with a guileless simper and I returned it as he strode on horseback from the Green Dragon and into the turbulent tide of the citizenry. February would conclude without him.

Obdurate was I in my avoidance of the likes of Thomas Hickey and the carousing festoons of the inn. My mind was elsewhere in entirety and, be it owed to my infallible adamancy or the miserable patter of my thirsty heart against my ribcage, I had the insatiable desire to see that woman. I lingered at the Dragon's doorstep for a few minutes whilst I considered my responsibilities, and though I owed it to everything that ever I had known to stay and formulate variant modes of assimilation in the colonies, I mounted my horse and fled Boston via the avenue opposite Charles'.

Had I lacked for pride, I might have been more resentful of my actions. I was growing quietly accustomed to the solemnity and tribulation that accompanied the journey into the unspoiled throes of the timberland. For every muddled crunch of the snow beneath my stallion's hooves, I was further numbed of my resolution to the Templar dogma. Still, my insipid veins boasted blood that craved the extermination of my enemies and the integration of a new world into the just and rigid structure of life. As misconstrued as my thoughts had become, I remained constant in consciousness of my place. My ideals had not been compromised by my fondness for the young Mohawk, but I found myself amending the terms that would inevitably keep me from her.

I tread disputed waters each day my mind was aggrieved with unfortunate and ample thoughts of the woman, and some time between the first words we had exchanged and the first she'd kissed my lips, the distrust I felt for myself began to dim. Upon studious reevaluation, I had never failed to admonish myself for my engagements. Deep into the starless abyss of night, I would dictate my encounters into the journal I had begotten on the outset of my trek to America and scorn my tremulous heart and the flush of my skin when my words reeked of the transient scent of her hair or the gentle bow of her mouth when directed at me. I had determined that nothing significant could come of our acquaintanceship, and yet I staved a routine of crossing the frontier with the sole intent of meeting once more. Always just once more.

The journey never was any less lengthy or any less arduous, but my tolerance for the wind, snow, and the boundless, constant time heightened with my unfathomable necessity to see her. I would listen stoically to my horse's desperate pants and spasmodic cries for leave of the perils I forced him through, and offer mercy only when I could smell the fragrant embers of the camp's center flame or see the onyx plumes of smoke defiling the sky. The vengeful cumulonimbus clouds had claimed the frontier that day, and again the forest and its inhabitants were plighted by ice and belts of snow. I arrived with only as much delay as the elements had inflicted, and dismounted the fatigued pinto upon breaching the defensible ring of evergreens the camp was lodged into. I slid my fingers round the reins and guided my horse decisively toward the longhouses ornamenting the fireside.

A man, capable and tall, approached me cautiously, as all of their people did. Something about my dress, artillery, and demeanor exuded the greed and boorishness ascribed to men who looked like me, and always the camp was engulfed in guardedness and disquiet the moment my presence was known. I'd have taken care to be stealthy, had the opinions of Ziio's comrades mattered. I whirled about punctually on one heel to aptly greet the man, my inert hand perched behind my back whilst the other tended to the bridle.

He wore a thick deerskin tunic and breeches of a thin material akin to burlap tucked beneath a pair of moccasins twined precariously about his legs. His raiment draped loose over his frame, but I had the vaguest impression that he was a robust and moderately well-built man. He did not extend a hand to me in salutation as I had mistakenly expected, but surveyed my person from beneath the imposing pall of his furrowed brow.

"What business do you have here?" he inquired with a voice lackadaisical and deep, though his English was laudable.

"I seek Ziio. Do you know where I might find her?"

The man pondered his reply for a moment. "Kaniehti:iohas gone to the waterfront."

I nodded curtly and began to stalk toward the bundle of pines that would give way to the clearing in a matter of meters. I stopped mid-step and turned partially to face the man again, a conscientious purse in my brow and an uncertain frown streaked across my maw. "She isn't hunting, is she?"

He shook his head and I returned to my efforts, stallion in tow.

We transcended the forest in the better part of an hour, pushing beyond the undergrowth and into the clearing more raucously than I'd have liked. It was not long before my eyes were drawn to her and I became acutely aware of her presence, despite the distance between us. She was on the shore before the nearly stationary waters, on her knees and hunched over the water with a downy mass strewn across her lap and spilling over one of her thighs. She still resembled the small and svelte beast I had mistaken her for, what with the dense animal hide blanketing her back and shoulders, and deforming the illusory figure she hosted. I stole closer to her instinctively, internally dreading the sensation of hardened snow crushing against my boot soles and the sound of a similar impact upon the horseshoes embellishing my mount's hooves. He whinnied idly and attracted her attention amidst the calamity of the blizzard.

"Haytham," she spoke unfamiliarly into the breeze. She maintained her work and did not acknowledge me, save for the partial and transient swivel of her head. I was unsurprised.

I released my horse with a vapid sway of my arm and took a seat beside the woman. I glanced first to the sizeable stretch of abrasive burgundy fleece sprawled across her legs and then to the affable face of my steed, nuzzling eagerly at the back of Ziio's head. Her chest quaked and shiftless laughter filled the air in a demure cloud of mist. She excused one hand from toiling with the surplus skin and blindly embraced the creature's jowl. I excluded myself from their affiliation, fascinated by the nature of the joy that had transmuted her features from remoteness to affinity. I had never incited anything of the kind, in her.

"I told you he would return to you," she chuckled, "Have you named him?"

I narrowed my brows considerately and turned my gaze upon the animal. "No, I don't suppose I have."

"_Oniehte_," she murmured against the stallion's muzzle. I stared quizzically at her.

"It is 'snow'," she expounded suddenly, "As often as you drive him through it, it only seems appropriate."

I nodded with a humored grin, turning from her to the water. "How do you pronounce it?"

She reiterated the word for me and I subsequently sampled it on my tongue, of course, failing miserably. There was a brief period of silence before I felt her hand upon my cheek, urging me to face her once more. Fathomless depths of auburn gleamed up at me from a dark thicket of eyelashes, patient, amiable, and punctuated with a placid simper. The contents of my lungs expatriated through the most fleeting of sighs as I took care to watch her. Worry was riddled across my face – I sensed it in the taut crease of my brow and the inflexibility of my frown. Spiting my reservations, her flesh only seemed to emit the warmth captured by her smile.

"Ohn-_yet_-tay," the throaty sounds oozed coolly from her upturned lips. She asked me to try, without saying anything at all.

I succeeded, and she bore her teeth jovially. Her fingertips grazed the side of my face for a few moments more, her attention cast to my skin and the scarlet flush that certainly obscured the pallor there. I wondered, perhaps in arrogance, whether I might be lauded with the fragile caress of her lips again, but her hand recoiled eventually, and with it went her leer. I swallowed dryly on the specter of a breath.

"That's the hide of the, ah…" I gesticulated broadly regarding the fur laid across her lap.

"_Atena:ti_," she completed with a wry and tickled smirk. Her lashes obscured the serenity of her large fawn orbs, revolved upon the sheet of flesh and bristled hair she had been diligently cleaning. "I have heard the white men call it something else."

"'Elk', one of my men says. It certainly did resemble something of the sort. Did it happen to, er, help at all? With the camp, I mean."

"You do not care that their hunger was abated." She said with a strange air of levity.

"What?" she was entirely correct in her supposition, but I was confronted by her nonchalant certainty. I narrowed my eyes at her and she seemed only to ease into tedium. "You can't know that."

"I am not unintelligent. You do not care, and only argue it _now_ because I knew it without your saying so. For what it is worth, none of us went without food last night." The longer she trained her gaze upon the elk skin, the more I wanted to dispose of it.

"That's good to hear." I muttered through my teeth.

"For us."

"Well yes, obviously."

"But not for you."

She finally met my eye with a shrewd and almost cynical cock of her brow. I was tempted to return the expression, but refrained and parried with an incredulous chortle. "I don't imagine it was all too beneficent for me, no."

"Therefore, it does not matter. No?"

"_Yes_."

"You see?"

"What? No!"

Her head tilted pugnaciously, her expression devoid of any modicum of pleasure or comicality. Her frown bore no significance or familiarity, and it was that which disturbed me most. "You are a selfish man." She said. "All that you do, you do for personal gain. Yesterday, you aided me in felling the _atena:ti_, but only so that you could speak to me today."

"Hamper your vanity," I was defensive against her merit, "I killed your beast only so that I might survive. Nothing more."

She wagered a nod with the meddlesome rumors of a smile soliciting her mouth. "You _helped_."

My agitation bested the insurgent swell of my heart and I found myself scowling. Her eyes swiveled back to the shroud about her lap and she brushed her fingers through the coarse tendrils garnishing its length. My jilted pride demanded that I contest her sure accusations and I very nearly did so, but the humbled warmth I had gleaned from watching her siphoned my breath, constricted my vocal cords. I was powerless to the delicate discretion of her eyes and of the partially sardonic, partially content coil of her lips. I was too frightened by the leap of my heart and airiness of my gut to distinguish the feeling I'd had from anything else. I did not smile, but I could not frown.

She bunched the pelt in her hands, careful not to undermine the labor she had spent beautifying the fur, and held it to her breast. I watched her stand and slog a few heavy steps through the snow down the shore before I joined in her struggle, Oniehte exclaiming as he trotted assiduously along behind me. The woman angled her trajectory from the coastline and into the trees – east of the campground. I studied her course for meager moments before hastening toward her with my neck craned and a pensive brow pursed as we plunged together into the forest.

The yellowing spruce trees wept clumps of snow from their thin, finicky branches and flecks of frigid powder showered the land from the murky heather skies. The cacophonous lap of the lake water against the salty shore reverberated through the arbor and fettered its habitual silence, crashing and devolving against my ears as it did upon the sand. The snowfall was underwhelming, irregular and light, fluttering lankly to the ground and adding to the meters-high banks of white. It accumulated upon the aged fronds in the canopy, bearing down upon feeble limbs and coating once hardy green nettles in frost and torpor. My fingertips scalded painfully beneath the thickness of my gloves, the numbness of my flesh subsiding and degrading into an infernal frozen heat.

"We've completely bypassed the camp," I remarked and welcomed the sleet addled air betwixt my teeth. The woman did not reply.

"Ziio, where are—" I began again, but was silenced immediately by the silken constancy of her voice.

She had begun to ascend the subtle incline of the terrain – a few terminable paces ahead – her feet angled strategically against the curvature of the land as she moved. Approaching a large blackened stump immersed in snow, she persisted forth not against nature, but in contingency with it. Her legs did not disturb the mounds of snow as much as the snow acclimatized to her presence, crumbling effortlessly aside of mutual courtesy – her for the land, and the land for its inhabitant. She buried her fingers in the dense cap of frost atop the rotten tree base and mounted it with an ease I could not imagine. I watched her crouch atop the blackwood stump before ambling toward the slight knoll, delayed by frosty birch arms and the cumbersome grip of the snow at my feet.

"It is in these dear dead days that my people repent for their transgressions," she said, gazing high above the treetops and into the whirling cistern of the sky. "It is now, when the land is barren and quiet and our hardship is great, that we must be most grateful to the earth and atone for the wrongs we have done to her."

I grunted and lodged my feet into the ground before the woman's perch. "Is that why you called me selfish before?"

"I called you selfish because you are selfish." There was an elusive atmosphere of humor to her words, although she did not smile. "We all have things that we must apologize for."

"For example," she spoke thoughtfully as she revolved on her toes and met my countenance with her own. Her hands extended to me and she took my dominant wrist between her fingers, scrutinizing the machinery of my hidden blade's interior before summoning it with a deft movement. "You are responsible for the lives and the blood of many."

I nearly wrenched my hand free of her grasp, but reasoned against it as her eyes bore into mine. I inhaled, shoulders hiking, as I primed a stately and concise argument for delivery. I loathed regarding her as I did others who questioned the Order, even transitorily. "The people who've died at the end of this blade are responsible for themselves."

"But the slaughter is yours."

"You aren't wrong," I relented, "But I bear my ascription with pride - whatever it may be."

Ziio gingerly retracted her fingers, and I my blade. I wrung my hand idly in an attempt to coerce the blood flow forthwith, but abandoned the effort in favor of the fair creature before me. The meek winter breeze disheveled the obsidian strands woven loosely into plaits at either side of her face, obscuring some of her flesh from view. I itched to touch her, to stroke the gleaming tresses from her cheek or feel the torridness of her flesh as I caressed her cheek in the cradle of my gloved hand. I conscientiously wound my fingers into a sturdy fist and anchored it to my side in restraint. I found my reflection in the russet of her eyes, amongst curiosity, distrust, and something terribly inviting. I grated my teeth behind the subterfuge of a careful sigh.

"And you, Ziio. For what are you penitent?" I teetered on the soles of my feet, gravitating thoughtlessly near to her.

She reciprocated my advance and rose unto her knees. Her fingertips coiled into the elaborate embellishments of my outer coat. The worn toe of my boot collided with the corroded face of the stump as I drew close, listless. Her breath grazed my skin in a precipitate fog. I lost myself in the phantom of her voice, rippling at the back of her throat and not quite forming anything cohesive. I tilted my head and relished in the sensation of her cheek against my nose, flesh flawless and warm. My core juddered in time with a nondescript and uniform drumbeat as I awaited the inevitable gratification of her kiss.

"Do you hear that?" she whispered against my lips.

I did.

The native frontier fowl fled their altitudinous boroughs and the decadent grey clouds overhead were quickly inundated with their multitude. Their variant bellows and squawks only temporarily eclipsed the remote and unmistakable cadence of the doldrums of the cavalcade. Ziio retreated to her haunches, gazing up at me with ardency and purpose in her immense tawny eyes. My heart rapped contritely against my chest and I struggled innately with composure and dissatisfaction, but I ensured her glimpse would not go unacknowledged. In one instant, I affirmed her query with little more than a glance and suddenly, she was gone.

She tore through the brush like a vein of lightning through the ebony flesh of night, leaving an undisturbed thicket of frosted pine fronds in lieu of herself. I didn't spare a thought as I pealed into the wintry scrub after her, snubbed sabre poised at my wrist and worry etched into the ridges of my brow. I pursued the vague sound of exhumed ice and the brushwood's timid whispers as they slid across her skin, decimating any vegetation that withstood my trod. I leapt over the decrepit skeletons of once lush shrubberies and arrived quite abruptly at a hollow rimmed with mighty evergreens that scathed the skyline with their snow-capped extremities. Succinctly aggravated, I hissed her name betwixt my tautly cinched teeth.

"_Haytham_," she responded with a pasquinade of my tone. I appropriated myself to properly address the woman.

Suspended from the upper crevice of the horticultural titans, Ziio glanced eagerly down at me, a glint of unrest catching her eye. I neared the base of the gargantuan tree, surveying its altitude with something like trepidation wadding up in my throat and absorbing my thoughts. I gulped and diverted my attention.

"Hurry, or we will lose them." She said as she gazed intently into the dense foliage inhabiting the tree's topmost branches.

The measured drone of the drums was perverted by the distinctly human sounds of exclamation and duress, as well as the faint creak of wooden wheels parting snow and sediment and compliant equine braying – a distant convoy. Intrigued, I snagged my gloved fingers in the jagged creases sprawling along the trunk in an ornate, living mosaic, scaling the leafy behemoth with a great deal of tribulation. With each naïve and desperate hitch of my fingers against the splintery, towering surface, my confidence in the strength of my hands and the agility and deftness of my wit declined. I panted – harried – against the breadth of the tree and glimpsed skyward, a wary rivulet of perspiration trickling down my brow.

Slush rained down from the alpine limbs upon which Ziio traversed. I was reminded of the first I had seen her transcend the earth in favor of the canopy, her actions utterly liquid with a sense of assuredness and routine. She crept along the length of frost addled appendages and ricocheted on the flats of her feet to the heavens. The residual quake of the branches did little more than alert me to her presence and grant the forest floor the gift of surplus precipitation. I was enamored with her practice – with how effortlessly she navigated the wooded, arcane world she was born into – and pondered whether I displayed a similar learnedness upon the rooftops of the cityscape. I found my toils hastening as I desired little else than to be near to her, again.

I clumsily lobbed myself unto the branches after her, moving swiftly in fear that my weight would exhaust the boughs on which I ambled. I did not glean any skill from my undertakings, though I did grow accustomed to the exhilaration of fear. I had since lost sight of the ground after plunging into the opulent mane of the tree, and felt the brunt of a frigid gale against my skin. We were looming the pinnacle of nature's giant.

I pitched against a thinner frond and encircled my fingers about it, managing my girth with the strength of my arms alone. I cursed the frightful thrum of my heart and wrenched myself forward. A violent crunch resounded in response. My fingers grew slack and I felt the limb collapse. My stomach leapt. The branch severed. I felt gravity towing first at my heels until enveloping me completely, and I fell.

I plummeted through the air silently, my eyes dormant on impulse, until I wasn't. My hand was snatched free of my descent, and my body lurched to a halt high above the forest floor. The labored grunts of my savior pervaded my ears and calmed my heart's relentless pulsation. The slender digits that sheathed my hand tightened with strain against the dampened deerskin flesh, maintaining a forceful heave in order to ward off decline. I forced my eyes alive and marveled quietly at the small woman stooped upon a nearby branch, her lips wrought about a seethe and her eyes upon mine. I forced composure through my veins and seized the branch under her heel by the hand, nodding my recompense to Ziio and reclaiming my hand in the same breath. I joined her upon her perch.

"Th-_thank_ you," I muttered breathlessly.

She regarded me with a terse nod and motioned me across the circumference of the tree trunk and toward the extent of a perpendicular extremity. I followed her implicitly, guarded in my gait as we climbed. We emerged amongst bushels of tremulous leaves, forestry continuing for eons into the horizon. The sun was long lost to us with regards to the eddying, snow-bearing froth in the sky, but I imagined the beauty that I might have beheld from this height in fair weather. I exhaled through my nose and explored the scrubland with ignorant eyes.

"There." She directed my sight with the soothing lilt of her voice.

Beneath us, across the expanse of a diminutive copse of equally sized trees, a caravan propagated by redcoats at its hind and fore inched indefatigably along the sooty pathway streamed amid the timberland. From our elevation, the men appeared as small and insignificant figures, without faces and hardly distinguishable voices, each stepping inorganically in tandem with one another. The man at the forefront, whom I recognized as lieutenant by predisposition and Ziio by recollection, cried out scurrilously to his soldiers of protocol and of cargo. I scoffed and glanced at the woman at my side.

Her eyes pooled with a sentiment I had yet to recognize as she glared bullet holes into the hefty freight carriage below. I tailed her resentful stare with indifference and observed the commanding iron bars containing the fatigued and burly bodies of men and women. Large black hands encircled their restraints in desperation and the amalgamated captive sobs overshadowed the rancorous exclamations of their jailor. My brows knotted and nausea engulfed my entrails, uncertainty and conflict racking my thoughts and the course of the blood in my feeble veins. My focus hinged upon the sound of a blade unfettered.

"What on Earth are you doing?" I barked lowly in protest of the scorned Mohawk, who steadied her hand against the manmade hilt of her hunting knife.

She grated her teeth and turned to me, hurt. "We have to save them."

"Look there," my chest deflated as I expelled a laden sigh, piercing the wind with my index finger. "Their procession is _leaving_ Boston, which means that those people have already been sold. This isn't a slave trade convoy, it's a delivery."

"We have to save them." She reiterated, more firm in her convictions this time than the last.

"We're too close to the camp, Ziio, we can't compromise your men for theirs."

She attempted contest for a moment, raising her spearhead against me, before allowing herself to fall lank. Her grasp upon the blade did not lessen as she leaned toward me, gingerly resting her head upon the slope of my shoulder. I inhaled sharply and glimpsed discreetly to her once again. She wept soundlessly, her eyes unyielding and her hate palpable.

We watched the convoy disappear around the bend undetected and in silence. My heart pounded in measure with the fragile shudder of Ziio's shoulders, and still we did not exchange any words. I did not take her into my arms. The malaise roosted in the pit of my stomach did not dissipate, and the sounds of the slaves' sorrow did not flee my memory. As I shifted to behold her countenance again, despite her nostalgic misery and the brook of loathsome tears dribbling along the picturesque curvature of her face, I was comforted by the knowledge that February would conclude with her.


	5. The Narcissus Contract

**A/N:** In addition to my uniform thanks to my readers, followers, reviewers and the like, I'd like to add a bit of...well, I suppose it's trivia to my commentary/notation. I always intended for Haytham and Ziio to have proclivities for certain senses, if that makes any sense. For example, Haytham is a very auditory, very visual man. He doesn't much care for being touched and is excruciatingly hesitant to touch others as well. I centered much of his subtleties on music and sound, considering quiet brings him tranquility to be alone with his thoughts. He's a perceptive person overall, and sight and sound are much more telling factors about people than, say, touch or taste. As for Ziio, interestingly enough, she's very kinetic. She needs to touch something to know it, and I really wanted to get that across in my writing. My apologies for that digression. Please enjoy, thank you always and immeasurably for the kind words!

**Disclaimer:** All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.

* * *

The placating glow of the inglenook guided my hand across the thin sleeve of parchment sprawled before me, the fracas of the tavern's lobby counterpoised by soothing flames enclosed in brick. I listened unenthusiastically to the languorous refrain of a solitary lute player posted near the door as I scrawled prosaic memories upon an otherwise vacant page. The spontaneous plucks of the bard's fingers against his habituated corded column stifled the drunken cacophony erupting relentlessly about me, erratic and listless. Despite my consciousness of the garrulous and inconstant grandeur of the life music tumbling free of the sour mouths of men and the clangor of mug flats upon the bar, my sentiments were with Ziio.

As I transcribed the frigid and perilous viscera of the frontier, I retreated to the reaches of my psyche that hosted thoughts redolent of her. I nearly felt the nip of a wayward squall as I recalled the way she cradled my face in the bed of her palm, observing me with an intensity and focus rivaling that with which I watched her. My skin had smoldered beneath her fingertips and I was overcome with a voracious anxiety I had only known in her company. Amber and iridescent of the utmost patience, her eyes had pored in a skyward tilt into my own. Although mere days had gone since the last I had been granted her presence, I unearthed the incorrigible longing to immerse myself in the splendor of her contralto and the complexity of her ever distant stare. I tilled my calloused fingertips through my hair, miring the kempt nature of the beleadel cinched at the base of my scalp, and my chest resounded with the guttural trepidation of a groan. It would not be long before I sought her out again.

I attempted to pen an additional line – perhaps about the icy fingers of the breeze at the cusp of a fearsome tree creeping across my bare face or the soporific expanse of greenery that was the timberland, dormant beneath a duvet of frost and bereavement – but retired my quill to the desktop in frustration. Painterly concepts, lucid memories, and the gossamer breath of inspiration toyed with my mind and perished as quickly as they had come. My hand, still coddling the useless plume between my thumb and forefinger, did not move. Where once words had resided, there was the reproachful thought of the young Mohawk woman, gazing at me through a veil of inveterate enigma. I endeavored to attain the wonderment and aggravation I had felt when beside her, but struck my written musings through with an unsightly streak of ink, useless and incapacitated by my own needless frivolity. The words had gone.

"Writing, Master Kenway?" I was usurped from the solemnity of my thoughts by the conversant baritone rising above the pub's wonted ataxia.

I did not acknowledge the elder man immediately. I erected my spine against that of my chair and wrought my shoulder blades circuitously against the mead of muscle lying just beneath the surface, rife with ache and inertia. "Not any longer, it seems."

I winced slightly at the discordant screech of the adjacent chair's legs scraping against the Dragon's filthy floor as my companion made a roost for himself and the cider cupped in his hand. He chortled. "Yer muse escapes you?"

My steely mien dispelled and I regressed into the warmth of Ziio's smile. I crossed my arms and turned toward the hearth, an inadvertent grin scrawled across my lips. "I'd hardly think it so romantic."

"Oh?" my accomplice proffered in jest, his imperious voice faltering with a portentous quake of his chest. "Yer expression would suggest just the opposite. Strange, considerin' I haven't seen a lady in yer enclave as a' late. Then again, I haven't seen much of you in recent days at all."

"Well, I suppose I haven't been in." I diverged my gaze to the ramblings upon the page marring the tabletop and gave a haphazard attempt at appraising the prose that lay. "Yours and Hickey's ceaseless interest in my personal affairs is…"

"A tad meddlesome, you think?" He subsidized with a jaunty snicker.

"Daunting." I rejoined. I would not be so easily entertained.

"I assure ye, sir, my inquiring mind entails only the best of intentions." He'd acquired something of a mawkish weight to his voice, though his throat contracted about a chuckle in good nature. "Cannot rightly say the same of Hickey, I'm afraid."

I addressed the man with my eyes and the fatigued reverberations of my chest were redolent of insouciance, neither condoning nor condemning his fraternization. "You're punctual this evening, Johnson."

"Aye," the man replied with a ponderous swig of his tonic, "Was here this afternoon with Pitcairn, playing a spot of fanarona intending to wait for the meeting, but the man ran off not but a few hours ago. He said something about the post – nothin' of my concern. Wagered a pocketful of sweetmeats and left them there on the table. Exonerated 'em right into my pocket."

"What use have you for confections? Or he, better yet."

The weathered creases hooding his eyes corroded further into his flesh as he bundled his brows and gazed pensively into the frothy golden surface of his drink. The coarse bristles of his facial hair made the bow of his mouth decidedly enigmatic and, though I acknowledged an abrupt change in demeanor, I had little ambition to interpret it. I facilitated my curiosity no further and found my hand hovering precariously about the inert quill upon the tabletop, inoperable.

Johnson sighed haughtily and eventually set his mug upon the table beside my mound of parchment, that same, vaguely piqued expression of apathy carving away at the yet young wrinkles in his skin. "Children, I suppose; it's something we've in common – Pitcairn and I. Regardless, the gesture's overdue, my having only returned from New York at dawn, today."

"Did you? Rather reckless of you to take leave, given the delicacy of our mission."

"We've a few months before our affairs become imperative, the way I see it, and I was summoned to attend to things with the Iroquois. I had words with some councilmen, ensured things were well at the Fort and, admittedly, played a few rounds of stickball. Predominantly business." He reasoned.

"The Iroquois? I thought you were visiting your children." I pinched my brow in suspect, the heinous touch of a frown tugging at my lips.

"I _was_." He replied measuredly, challenging words yet unspoken with a guarded glower. I understood his implications quite abruptly.

We were swallowed, then, by silence as Johnson baptized his thoughts in drink and the effervescent film of introspection spilling over the lip of his mug. I was grateful for the reprieve, preferring the ambiance of an active conscience to that of ensuing, clamorous reality. I contemplated my scarred and hardened fingertips in brevity and imagined my companion's brood behind a vestige of dispassion. Boys, the lot of them. I could hardly fathom William Johnson and a daughter, not of the same name, but like in lineage. I wondered with a harrowing ache of my chest what circumstances had so mercifully beneficed him so as to permit such a life – seamlessly and simultaneously intercrossed between Order and Iroquois, duty and dalliance. In the stead of the man's anonymous lover, I found the immutable frame of Ziio, standing amidst false children and subjugating false motherhood in a facet of my mind all too tangible. My conscience belonged to her, irrevocably.

I raised my eyes attentively as I caught a slight but sudden movement lurking in my periphery. Johnson has reeled his neck toward the Dragon's entrance, reverberating with the tuneless splendor of inebriation and boyish aggression. Unsurprised, I watched unenthused as Benjamin Church goaded his accomplice, Thomas Hickey, over the sodden threshold and out of winter's debilitating bite.

"_Cammon_, man, you're making a scene!" Benjamin feigned composure as he gesticulated understatedly with either of his bare, pudgy hands, fingers splayed inelegantly like a string of sausages, ruptured and strewn with the unsightly reminders of struggle.

"Well _gimme_ a damn second!" Thomas bellowed through the aperture, still ajar with the thick maple wood shimmying idly betwixt the wall and the heel of a discarded workman's boot. The man embedded his fingertips into his thigh and with a staunch, rigid jerk of his arms, dislodged himself from the sizeable dune of soiled snow on the roadway and stumbled into the tavern. "So _excitable_ – you're bloody exhausting, Church."

"I'll not shine on yer dallying, men, over here." William conjured the men toward us with an exhaustive ellipse with his subdominant hand. His voice carried along the last of the gaping doorway's frigid regurgitation, uneven and evidently fatigued by an exasperation I shared, and something like sopor.

"Gentlemen," I paid in etiquette and little else as Hickey and Church drew chairs to our table.

"Evenin'," Hickey grumbled with a languorous smile. Church nodded brusquely over his ample shoulder as he wielded his hands before the ingleside.

"Well, you don't lack for tardiness, though it appears _ale_ is in abundance," I remarked, unencumbered by the conscientious rigidity of Church's physique.

"Oi!" Hickey exclaimed in retaliation, lurching clumsily across the tabletop. Johnson retracted his hand, holding nearer his drink. "Pitcairn ain't showed 'is face round here neither! If anything, point the bloody finger at 'im!"

"He'll be here," Johnson stated firmly.

"What's he gotta do that's so important anyhow?" the pugnacious man groused.

"I haven't the slightest," I replied, "but what of _you_?"

Hickey refuted my expectant glower with an enticing purse of his brow for a few moments, but relinquished eventually with a guttural, thoroughly revolting snivel. "We was up in Charlestown playin' billiards. Church 'as a talent for the fame, turns out, an' I got m'self a clandestine kinda interest in money, as you might'a known."

"Thomas, succumbing to the gambit?" Johnson relayed heartily with a red-faced chuckle.

"Well, we was gonna leave sooner, but when we went to fetch the horses, a game a' cudgeling broke out an' we _had_ to see the turnout."

"In fairness," Church slurred, "_I_ wanted to leave."

"Cudgeling's a boorish sport fought by barbarians and fools, interchangeable, and incited by loosened mouths and indiscriminant barmaids." I digressed and glanced from the party, becoming quickly exhausted by the volatile and stentorian nonsense spewing concurrently from every oblique route about me. I strained to center on the intermittent and concord string flicks of the since displaced musician, if not to ease my mind, then to silence the dissonant tempest brewing in the sour air of the pub's main floor by even a modicum.

I impassively attended to the conversation once more, watching with inevident, cynical amusement as Thomas Hickey garrisoned his argument with a hiccup. "Yeah, but you ain't seen a match 'tween a Scot an' a Cossack before."

I spun my focus briefly to the ceiling with a sniff.

"Cudgeling? Is that what this audience is about?" resounded the thin and aged floorboards amidst labored groans as the remaining fragment of our motley band trudged across the unattended grit and spoil of the Green Dragon's unapologetic bacchanalia.

The man emerged from the restless offing as a sloop through the typhoon torn tide, filthy extremities and faces spilling mightlessly over his shoulders and vanishing lankly back into the sea of bodies and fracas in his wake. He rejoiced softly in the eyes, entrenched by sleeplessness with eaves of wretched antiquity, heavy in step. He bore his own weight like a burden unwieldy, each footfall rippling through him in entirety and edging him forth like the seismic steps of a Trojan horse. He wore evanescence in his slender, wrinkled stare, and a shiftless grunt on his mouth, unassailable and altogether unbecoming. His weathered hand secured the dormant pommel of his sword, suspended at his waist, and would likely have intimidated a man lesser in camaraderie or tact for combat. He nodded to a miserable looking tenant and thusly robbed him of the barren seat before him, sidling between it and our table with a tired expulsion of breath.

"Mr. Pitcairn," I said in a nigh neighborly inflection, though my prim and uniform frown squelched such ambitious delusions. "Hello."

"Yes, yes, _hello_ John, old man!" Hickey shouted muddily from under the overbearing cowl of a dastardly grin. "An' wot 'ave you been up to this evenin'?"

John Pitcairn's lips peeled back into a smile, a great deal of effort written in the dour lines of his face. "Judging by the smell of ya, not nearly as much fun. Salutations, boys. William, Master Kenway."

Hickey relapsed into a bout a modest humor and conceded in favor of our ally's indifference, dispelling his contumely and sealing his mouth. He motioned a barmaid with a nod and impatient circumnavigation of his hand. He twirled his index finger in a roundel about the table and the woman bounded toward the bar with a timid, servile curtsy. I watched him through ambiguous eyes as the man's stare emulated the subtle rock of the waitress's hips, covetous and cold in the same instance. I had no interest in partaking in his tirade of debauchery and imbibition. I interwove my fingers upon the disheveled heap of paper and relieved my lungs of weighty, surplus air, and commanded the attention of my men with little more than the guttural clearance of my throat.

"Now that we're all met, gentlemen, I should like to expatiate upon my reason for calling for such organized assembly." I began, addressing each of my allies with a cursory glimpse, "In lieu of Charles Lee's departure and the generous delay in our league against Edward Braddock, we find ourselves chiefly latent, but free, however, to discuss matters of the Order. As such, I'm obligated to denote that the Assassin presence in the colonies is vast, as we're all aware, but spectacularly obscure. I propose a lobby of diverse and expansive nature, one that will indefinitely sow us to New England soil as propagators of a novel and illustrious empire."

I observed the subtle transmutations of the faces about me – quirks of intrigue, creased brows by illicit confusion, iniquitous simpers of knowledge and allegiance. I did not permit my enthusiasm, my untarnished motivation, to permeate my expression and continued concisely, void of inflection or sentiment. "What I propose, brothers, is the exhibition and usurpation of the Assassin domain. We'll maneuver with the utmost subtlety, as we've the invaluable asset of anonymity here in the colonies and I should rather like to preserve it. Identify members of their ranks and report them to me – if we can't influence their fidelity or otherwise extricate information from them, we dispatch them. The Masters are our ultimate objectives; do away with the mentors, and the lieges unravel."

"You've your contract, men, now I beseech you find me names." I traversed the table once more with a solicitous, idle gaze before pressing my palms against the cluttered surface, smoothing my skin across the rough lumber and corrugated parchment. "May the light of the Father of Understanding guide us."

The men echoed the sempiternal farewell before eventually diverging into unrelated tangents of conversation and strategy alike. Thomas and Benjamin recounted rashly portentous tales from their jaunt in Charlestown, perforated by verbose and unwarranted digressions and vulgar gestures. Our corner of the tavern fluoresced with the vigor of affiliation, the virility of our company, and the ceaseless fecundity of sound – purposeless, frenzied babel. I withered away to the pleasantry of the woodland, utterly silent and elegiac, yet respiring with a precious, unattainable soundless symphony. I wondered when I might be so audacious as to spoil myself with the gratuity of silence's song, of the muted howl of winter's dying breath, of that woman's quietly enduring, loquacious eyes. I longed perpetually for the lamentable cadence of nothing, and again, I found solace only in thoughts of her.

"It's remarkable, what yer doing, Master Kenway," I heard Johnson mutter meritoriously against the gape of his tankard. "With the refugee camp and yer Ziio. Sustaining our alliances is easily as important as this new assignment a' yours. I'd take comfort in knowing you'll continue your work with them whilst we mind the Assassins."

I considered the man with my words alone, fixation narrowed upon the abyss. "She isn't mine, though it was always my intent to keep our ties with the natives close. Such bonds are imperative."

"Of course."

The woman called Catherine sauntered eagerly up to our party, bearing a tray of cider jugs and a delicate vase efflorescing with sprawling yellow leaflets and bulbs. She bowed at the waist and carefully poised her bearings upon the tabletop, taking paramount care in positioning her flowers with the pink pads of her fingers. With her thumb, she dressed the fragile surface of a golden petal and succinctly brought the digit to her cheek, thoughtfully beholding her arrangement through reedy blue eyes. She smiled first at William Johnson, and then to me.

"I've been growing these in the window for months now," she mused warmly, "My mother always said jonquils seem to say 'return my affection'."

"How about 'return my pittance', ya wench!" Hickey dribbled objectionably, shunting his mug across the room with a dramatic bellow. "Fetch me another beer an' try to keep the piss out of it, this time!"

With an odious, unladylike rejoinder, Catherine waded back into the fray, leaving the modest bouquet behind. I had pondered what benefit would be gained from scolding Thomas, but aborted the arbitrary thought nearly as quickly as it was incited. I drove my eyes across the table and witnessed the halcyon, almost whimsical gaze the flowers had earned from John Pitcairn.

"Yer something of a private man, Haytham," Johnson proffered casually, "But I've noticed yer in better spirits, lately. Has that something to do with her, I wonder?"

I smiled, a reserved laugh upon my lips. I addressed the jonquils with reinvigorated stringency as I drew my fingers along the length of the page before me and felt the weight and the warmth of the script against my skin.

"I wonder." I replied.


End file.
